Sam Leith: A seedy fringe like PIE was a sign of its times

We shriek at Harriet Harman because we don’t like to think how easily any of us could have made the same mistake

Monday 3 March 2014 12:20 BST

Surely we’re missing the big picture here. We’re exercised over whether Harriet Harman should apologise for having been involved with an organisation affiliated to a pro-paedophilia campaigning group (answer: probably, yes) — as if the existence of a said campaigning group in the first place deserves no more than a shrug of acknowledgement. Going for Harman in this context is like indicting Fred West’s postman for failing to notice the smell.

As I’m not the first to point out, the Paedophile Information Exchange had a letterhead, published periodicals, gave public presentations and received public money. They weren’t some covert criminal organisation. By this token we should be finding a way to bust the whole Seventies, beat it up in custody a bit and pack it off to the nonce wing for life.

The anti-Harman campaign has as its premise the idea that PIE’s activities were so unthinkable, so self-evidently wicked, that they should have been anathematised on the spot. But obviously they weren’t. Neither Harriet Harman — nor, it appears, the Daily Mail back then — seems to have been much exercised.

PIE looked like another liberation movement that was at odds with conventional morality. There were a lot of those in the Seventies and most of them were to the good.

There is no human enormity — from slavery to racial extermination -- that has not been found distinctly thinkable by whole populations of respectable, middle-of-the-road citizens. So conventional morality deserves all the prodding and poking it can get, and that was what it got in the Seventies.

To find a seedy fringe arguing for the age of consent to be lowered to 10, and those arguments prospering at least to the extent that they received a hearing, isn’t all that astonishing.

Unthinkable? Unspeakable? Those arguments were thought and they were spoken, and respectable opinion disapproved but did not prohibit their utterance.

Good. The conventional morality was tested and in this case — it being abundantly clear that a child cannot meaningfully consent to sex — it was found to be robust. When PIE’s leadership were caught putting their “progressive” ideas into practice (ie assaulting children and sharing images of abuse) they were, quite rightly, jailed.

To acknowledge that our morals are culturally conditioned — that autres temps, autres moeurs is not a shabby excuse but a profound truth — isn’t the end but the beginning of moral seriousness. Still, it makes us uncomfortable. We shriek at Harriet Harman because we don’t like to think how easily any of us could have made the same mistake.

Obviously, he has been twitted with the counter-example of Rio Ferdinand — but I’m not sure that’s a knock-down answer to his complaint. Are England captains not, proportionally speaking, whiter than the teams they lead? Racism seems a pretty plausible explanation. At the same time, he slips in as if it were a supplementary point.

We needn’t take Campbell’s abilities entirely at his own estimation: let’s split the difference and give him five years of imaginary captaincy.

I think George might prefer a proper Italian

Somehow, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have found a babysitter. They were photographed on a Georgeless night out this weekend to celebrate a friend’s birthday at Bunga Bunga, a pizza and karaoke bar in Battersea described in reports as an “Englishman’s Italian”.

My word. I’ve been to Bunga Bunga for, er, a work assignment and “an Englishman’s Italian” doesn’t begin to cover it. This is an Italian restaurant as conceived by a Butlins redcoat who has fallen asleep in front of the fire after eating too much cheese: mopeds on the ceiling, Michelangelo’s David’s man-parts on the waiters’ aprons; a scathing transvestite emcee, cocktails drunk out of mugs in the shape of Silvio Berlusconi’s head, and the entire staff bursting into a song-and-dance routine every 15 minutes or so.

Quite unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.

Never too old for new dates

The writer Monica Porter has kicked up a lively wee storm by revealing how, after a long-term relationship ended, she took to internet dating sites under the alias of “Raven” and enjoyed a series of no-strings flings with men in their thirties. Her book The Raven: My Year of Dating Dangerously describes how she advertised herself as looking for “a nice time with people I like”, and found just that. Good on her. It’s only sad so many people seem repulsed that “a good time with people I like” might be available to a grandmother; and that she felt the need to knock six years off her age in her dating profile.

Odd, though, that she chose her alias from Poe’s poem The Raven. Its refrain, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’” is the opposite of apt. Perhaps “Rosebud”, from Herrick, would have been fitter for purpose. Discarded, I expect, because of its association with Citizen Kane’s sledge.